Adam Ford, who founded the Christian satire site The Babylon Bee and currently runs the humor-based news and opinion site Not the Bee, along with current Babylon Bee Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann, is among the latest to be locked out of Twitter for violating community guidelines.
On Sunday (March 20), The Babylon Bee Twitter account was suspended after sharing a satirical article in which Transgender US Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine was dubbed “Man of the Year.” The article also called out Levine’s pre-transition first name, an act known as “deadnaming,” and referred to Levine as a man throughout.
Twitter told The Babylon Bee that they violated the platform’s rules against hateful conduct, saying, “You may not promote violence against, threaten, or harass other people on the basis of race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, religious affiliation, age, disability, or serious disease.”
Twitter told The Babylon Bee that their account would be unlocked if they deleted the tweet, something The Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon is refusing to do.
“[Twitter] could, of course, delete the tweet themselves. But they won’t,” Dillon said. “It’s not enough for them to just wipe it out. They want us to bend the knee and admit that we engaged in hateful conduct.”
Two days later, Babylon Bee Editor-in-Chief Kyle Mann received a similar message from Twitter after tweeting, “Maybe they’ll let us back into our @TheBabylonBee Twitter account if we throw a few thousand Uighurs in a concentration camp.”
Mann’s remark was a jab at Twitter, who has allowed the accounts of officials from corrupt government regimes to remain active, including accounts of people in power in China, a government which has been systematically persecuting the Uyghur people.
Ford tweeted a screenshot of the message Mann received.
“Babylon Bee editor-in-chief @The_Kyle_Mann has now been locked out of Twitter for this tweet,” Ford said. “So, literally perpetuating genocide will not get you booted off Twitter, but making jokes criticizing those who do, will. Got it.”
The next day, Ford got himself locked out of Twitter for a tweet that read, “Don’t retweet this or you’ll get suspended from Twitter.” It appears that tweet may have been a retweet of an earlier statement Ford made, which said, “Yes @TheBabylonBee has been suspended from Twitter for hate speech for calling Rachel…Levine a man. Which is objectively true. The price of getting our account back is deleting the tweet. This is real life.”
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